Ted Grant and Roger Silverman

Bureaucratism or Workers' Power

From an India to an America

Fifty years ago the world was shaken to its foundations by the
greatest single event in human history. In a vast empire spanning
one-sixth of the earth's surface - a barbaric land of savage
despotism ruled for centuries by the knout and the pogrom - the
workers, poor peasants and soldiers brought the age-old Tsarist
edifice of repression crashing to its downfall. Within the space of
eight months they came out on to the streets five times to assert
their rights and consciously to shape the course of history in the
interests of the exploited masses. They chased out Tsars and
landowners, racialists and bureaucrats, generals and executioners,
capitalists and renegades. Organised into the most democratic
system known to mankind - the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and
Peasants' Deputies, elected at every unit of labour with direct
right of recall - they took state power into their own hands.
Production was to be consciously planned instead of being geared to
individual profit and the blind forces of the market. The Russian
revolution of October 1917 was the opening act of the drama in
which the wage slaves and the toiling masses of East and West would
achieve their emancipation from class oppression. Its shadow falls
across the whole of the world's subsequent history.

To workers the world over, Russia since 1917 represents a
paradox. It is a symbol of liberation and solidarity, and at the
same time a bloodstained chapter in the story of workers'
repression, slave labour, frame ups, intrigue and red tape. The
ideals of October were cynically perverted into a mockery of
socialism. But the very survival of the nationalised economy for
half a century and its extension to one third of the world,
provides glaring proof of the decadence and impotence of capitalism
in our era. The most striking lesson of all lies in the scale and
speed of Russia's transformation.

Fifty years of planned economic progress in the USSR tell us, in
the irrefutable language of iron and steel, more than all the
theoretical treatises put together about the need for society to
exercise complete control over production. In 1917 the country
produced less than 3% of total world industrial output. Today the
figure is 20%. In the fifty years from 1913 (the highest point of
the Russian pre-revolutionary economy) to 1963, through two bloody
world wars, one ruthless revolutionary war against world
imperialist intervention, two devastating famines, and one
semi-civil war, and burdened throughout by red tape and
mismanagement, total industrial output rose more than 52 times
over. The corresponding figure for the USA is less than six
times, while Britain just about managed to double her output. If we
ignore the effects of massive urbanisation, expanding the size of
the industrial working class from under one tenth to half of a
growing population, and consider only industrial productivity of
labour, the key index of society's advance, we find that, whereas
Britain has progressed by 73% in the same period and America by
332%, the USSR has achieved the phenomenal figure of 1,310%! Steel
production rose from 4.3 million tons in 1928 (at the start of the
first Five Year Plan) to 100 million tons today - more than
Britain, France, West Germany and Italy put together, and only 20
million tons less than the USA. The chemical industry has grown 200
times, and many branches of Soviet engineering today lead the
world. The land that half a century ago was the barren 'granary of
Europe', racked with illiteracy and disease, now sends sputniks
round the Earth and rockets to the Moon.

Out of a population that has grown by less than 15%, the number
of technicians has grown 55 times; the number in full time
education over six times; the number of books published 13 times;
hospital beds nearly ten times, and children at nurseries 1,385
times. The urban population has increased four times, from 15% to
nearly 60%. Life expectancy has more than doubled and child
mortality has dropped nine times. Russia produces more scientists,
technicians and engineers every year than the rest of the world put
together and more than twice as many are employed there as in
America. Four times as much per head of population is spent on
education in Russia as in Britain.

These colossal achievements have no parallel in history. They
are even more startling than they seem, in that steady growth was
confined to the period between the start of the first Five Year
Plan in 1928 and the outbreak of war in 1940, and then, after
post-war reconstruction, from 1950 onwards, about thirty years in
all. Public ownership and planning have been vindicated, despite
the terrible handicaps with which Russia was afflicted -
backwardness, illiteracy, capitalist encirclement and a vast
parasitic bureaucracy clinging on to its back. It is not for its
failures but for its successes that capitalist politicians hate the
Soviet Union. They rejoiced at every setback and every crime, which
enabled them to pose as "democrats" and to explain that "socialism
does not work."

For workers, it is vital to examine the balance
sheet and understand the reasons for the terrible price as well as
the historic gains of the revolution. In this pamphlet we attempt
to explain the contradictory nature of Soviet society; the terrific
impetus of the planned economy, and the sinister totalitarian
shadow cast over it by the prolonged survival of capitalism in the
West. The labour movement the world over must grasp the vital
lessons of this experience, if it is to move forward in the
struggle for socialism.

All Power to the Soviets

The worldwide epoch of wars and revolutions began in 1914, after
decades of relative social harmony that had led the first
revisionists to conclude that "capitalism has solved its problems."
Faithful to their prospects of "national roads to socialism", the
European Social Democratic parties all swung into support of their
"own" capitalist governments in a world war that led twelve million
workers to their slaughter. The war was followed by two decades of
social explosions; mass unemployment, revolution, civil war, and
fascist barbarity - death throes of a rotten social order,
culminating in a new and even bloodier world war.

The working class began the world wide defeat of capitalism in
the country where the system was least secure. Russia in 1917 was a
semi-colony, producing less than 3% of world industrial output,
while her territory covered one sixth of the globe. For every
hundred square kilometres of land, there were only 0.4 kilometres
of railway track. While industry was highly concentrated in the few
urban oases within a desert of peasant barbarity, 80% of the
population scratched a bare existence out of their tiny strips of
land, using the most primitive tools and methods. Agriculture was
fragmented into nearly 24 million smallholdings. Over 70% of
Russian subjects were totally illiterate, and what reactionary
priest-ridden education there was aimed only at rearing a new
generation of bureaucrats within the upper caste. Heavy industry
was dependent on foreign finance Capital; French, British, Belgian
and other Western investors owned shares amounting to 90% of
Russia's mines, 50% of her chemical industry, over 40% of her
engineering plant, and 42% of her banking stock.

Russia had had no bourgeois revolution, destroying feudal
restrictions, as in the West. With its vast under-populated
territory overrun throughout the centuries by nomadic hordes,
Russia had a very weak, sluggish economic development. Capitalism
had been too weak to come to power through the peasant revolt of
the eighteenth century or the abortive liberal coup d'etat of 1825
and it had arrived on the scene too late to pursue an independent
historic role. Its resources were too limited to hope to compete
with the modern Western monopolies on the world market. It was
bound hand and foot to the Tsarist autocracy at home and the big
financiers abroad. Its sudden spurt of development followed the
emancipation of the serfs in 1861, whereby the absolutist monarchy
began to balance more heavily on liberal landowners, nascent
capitalists and foreign bankers, releasing the reserves of manpower
for industry. Thus, capitalism in Russia did not evolve in such a
way as to rest securely on a wide stratum of intermediate small
businessmen, stable capitalist farmers, etc. It was suspended over
society by world imperialism on the strings of the Holy Tsar, and
had no wide social foundations. The speed of its belated growth
prepared the rapid advance of the industrial workers' class
consciousness, and the violent upheavals that ensued. Once industry
did spring up, propped up by huge foreign investment, it imported
ready made the most up to date machinery. In 1914, while 17.8% of
American industrial workers were employed in factories with over
1,000 workers, the corresponding figure in Russia was as high as
41.4% and much higher in Moscow and Petrograd. Young peasants
streaming off the land were suddenly plunged into great mechanical
sweatshops of the most intensive exploitation, and they came fresh
to the realities of industrial class struggle and militant
organisation more rapidly than the now mighty British labour
movement did, with its gradual evolution over centuries through
handicraft and manufacture, and its craft traditions.

The early Russian socialists were "Populists" who believed that
the Russian peasantry could jump straight into a peculiarly
"Russian" rural form of "Communism". They were paralysed by the
inertia of the masses, and tried to find a short cut to utopia by
evangelism and terrorism alternately. They preached revolution in
the villages and were indignantly turned over to the police. They
managed after twelve years' efforts to assassinate a Tsar, and
found that vicious reaction was the only consequence. It was the
stirrings of the Petrograd workers in the stormy strikes of the
1890s that established Marxism in Russia. By 1905 - in a revolution
that taught more to the labour movement than any event since the
Paris Commune, and in which the working class, independently of any
theorist or "agitator", created the Soviets, models for workers all
over the world - the capitalist politicians hastily abandoned their
liberal demands for a measure of control over the government's
actions, in face of the militancy and solidarity of the working
class. Any challenge to the tottering regime could only be led by
the workers.

By confining the workers' tasks within the boundaries of Russia
the nationalistic Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic
Labour Party had no perspective but the installation by proxy of a
capitalistic government, which would then mechanically repeat the
experience of Western capitalism. Until all the tasks of capitalism
had been fulfilled and the economy had reached Western standards,
the workers' parties would serve indefinitely as a loyal
opposition. Lenin and the Bolsheviks answered this narrow and
scholastic theory with internationalist horizons. The victory of
the democratic agrarian revolution in Russia, led by the workers
and peasants, would precipitate the world socialist revolution.
Trotsky predicted that the socialist revolution in Russia would be
the first breakthrough of the workers of the world into the future.
Supported by the poor peasants and allied to the workers of the
metropolitan countries, the Russian workers would be the first to
overthrow the capitalist class. While a capitalist Russia would
remain a semi-colony of Western imperialism, socialism would only
be built hand in hand with the workers of the advanced countries.
Trotsky was proved right in his prognosis.

The great events of 1917 brought the two outstanding
revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky together. Lenin returned to
Russia in April to find the Bolshevik party thrown into confusion
by the unexpected fall of Tsarism and the assumption of power by
liberal politicians. The so-called "Provisional Government" which
had stepped uninvited into the vacuum had no following in the
Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants who had overthrown the
old regime. Greeted on his return with bouquets and flowery
speeches by Menshevik leaders, Lenin spoke over their heads to the
masses, welcoming the "advance guard of the world proletarian army"
and condemning the capitalist government. The revolution had to be
completed by the unchallenged victory of Soviet power.

In April, demonstrations led by the Bolsheviks forced the direct
representatives of capital out of the "Provisional Government", and
by their simple slogans "Bread, Peace, Land" and their brilliant
propaganda the Bolsheviks exposed the inability of all the
compromisers within the labour movement to solve even the most
elementary problems. When Petrograd was threatened in August by the
counter-revolutionary army of General Kornilov, the Kerensky
Government was unable to put up any resistance. It was completely
under the thumb of the capitalists, who feared the Bolsheviks a
thousand times more than the reactionary relics of Tsardom. It was
the Bolsheviks who organised the masses in a united front with
Kerensky to repel Kornilov. Months of patient explanation against a
background of concentrated experience won an overwhelming majority
to Bolshevism, and the culmination of the revolution in October
1917 behind the cry "All Power to the Soviets!" met with very
little internal opposition. Power was in the hands of the
people.

Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky had recognised the state itself
to be a barbaric relic of the past, an instrument of class
oppression which would wither away from the very inception of the
workers' dictatorship. "Government over people" would be superseded
by the mere "administration of things". Lenin saw that a smooth
transition to a classless and stateless society was impossible
within the confines of a backward Russia, in which not one of the
tasks already performed in the West (industrialisation, education,
etc.) had been achieved. Capitalism had exhausted all its
possibilities of developing society on a world scale, and the
Bolsheviks looked with confidence to the main world centres in the
West for a further advance of the world revolution.

In the meantime, Lenin enumerated a number of measures designed
to fight against the constant danger of bureaucratism, including: No
standing army, but the armed people. All officials, managers, etc.,
to be elected by the workers' organisations, with direct right of
recall. All officials to receive the same wages as a skilled worker.
(In view of the shortage of technicians, etc., the Bolsheviks were
compelled to allow a clearly defined maximum differential of four
to one, which Lenin frankly described as "a capitalist
differential".) Popular participation in all administrative duties;
direct management and control by Soviets. ("When everybody is a
bureaucrat, nobody is a bureaucrat.")

The revolutionary government
was a coalition of the Bolsheviks and the left Social
Revolutionaries (representing the poor peasants). At first even the
capitalist parties (apart from the fascist Black Hundreds) were
left free to organise. It was only the exigencies of the subsequent
civil war and the dangerous activities of the saboteurs and
counter-revolutionaries that forced the Bolsheviks to ban other
parties, as a temporary measure.

Based on a publicly owned and planned economy, the most
democratic system in history shone as a beacon to workers all over
the world. The oppressed and exploited of East and West cheered the
victory of their comrades in Russia. In the hour of danger that was
approaching, with the brutal intervention of no less than
twenty-one armies of foreign capitalism, their support was the
vital factor in saving the revolution from defeat.

Workers of All Countries Unite

The overthrow of the capitalist government, once confronted with
the organised wrath of the masses, had been a simple matter of
hours, with practically no bloodshed in the capital and only a
short period of fighting in Moscow. The Russian ruling class had
lost all authority, and the "socialist" stooges in the "Provisional
Government", behind whom they had been forced to shelter after
April, had demonstrated their real bias in practice to their former
supporters. The people wanted peace, bread and land. Kerensky had
led a million more to the slaughter on the front, halved the bread
ration, and turned his guns on to peasants spontaneously taking
over the great landed estates. The October revolution was the
highest expression of the socialist consciousness that had been
attained through their experience by peasants as well as workers.
Lenin, an eminent respecter of theory, said: "The masses learn more
in a day of social revolution than in decades of socialist
theory…An ounce of experience is worth a ton of theory." At
last the soviets, democratic organs of workers' power, had full and
undivided power.

Horror-stricken, the capitalists of the whole world refused to
believe that the Bolsheviks could stay in power for a week. When
they finally faced up to reality, they saw (as did the Soviet
masses) that the victorious October revolution constituted a dire
threat to their own survival. Revolution raised its banner in
Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Italy, France, Britain and
elsewhere. In Britain, the immediate effect was the general strike
on the Clyde, the great mutinies among the British forces in
France, the Triple Alliance, the adoption by the young Labour Party
of its socialist programme (Clause Four) and, during the
intervention, the mass Councils of Action which Lenin characterised
as "Soviets - in essence if not in name."

Suddenly the rival robber
gangs that had massacred millions for the previous four years in
the scramble for markets joined together in combined attack on
their common enemy - revolution. Early in 1918, British naval
forces landed in Murmansk, on the flimsy pretext of "helping to
defend the gains of freedom won by the revolution against the iron
hand of Germany." Within days they were in fact marching South on
Petrograd, disarming the workers and shooting local Bolsheviks. In
April the Japanese landed at Vladivostok, and an "Omsk All Russian
Government" was set up - an alliance of Cadets, Mensheviks and SRs
which, relying willy-nilly on Tsarist ex-officers, was shattered
after two months by a coup installing Admiral Kolchak as dictator.
Meanwhile, Germany occupied the Ukraine in collusion with White
Guards Krasnov and Wrangel. While the Allies screamed that Lenin
and Trotsky were "German agents", it was claimed in Germany that
"in the Bolshevist movement…the hand of England is seen. By
these movements England has gained much, since owing to Bolshevik
phrases and money the strike movement was called forth in the
Central Empire." The police mentality sees in social clashes only
the malevolent plots of conspirators. Every major capitalist power,
and many minor ones too, joined in the rush to smash the revolution
for all time.

The original excuses were replaced by the hackneyed pretext of
assisting the "vast portions of the population struggling against
Bolshevik tyranny." Respectable British diplomats and officers on
the spot, sensitive to the mood of their subordinates, revealed the
true situation. Colonel Robins of the British Embassy in Moscow
telegraphed home in March 1918: "Know of no organised opposition to
Soviet Government." Kerensky's revolt had been crushed in hours and
in April the Don Cossacks mutinied, murdering the hated Kornilov
and driving their Hetman (Chieftain) Kaledin to suicide. Colonel
Robins wrote "Death Kornilov verified, this final blow organised
internal force against Soviet Government." But organised
external force had hardly begun. The British agent Lockhart
admitted: "I had little faith in the strength of the anti-Bolshevik
Russian forces…The one aim of every Russian bourgeois [and
99% of the so-called 'loyal' Russians were bourgeois] was to secure the intervention of British troops [and failing British, of German
troops] to establish order in Russia, suppress Bolshevism and
restore to the bourgeois his property."

Colonel Sherwood-Kelly of the Siberian forces said, "I formed
the opinion that the puppet government set up by us in Archangel
rested on no basis of public confidence and support, and would fall
to pieces the moment the protection of British bayonets was
withdrawn." It was officially admitted that "the North Western
(Baltic) Government was organised by General Marsh in 45 minutes'
time." General Gough recognised that "the Russians are determined
to prevent the return to power of the old official classes, and if
forced to a choice, which is what is actually happening at the
moment, they prefer the Bolshevik Government." Count Kokutsev, for
the Whites put it even more delicately: "Without intervention, we
cannot get through, for, while the moderate element exists,
it is not concentrated…" The unspeakable atrocities of
White Guards Denikin, Kolchak, Yudenich, Wrangel, etc., reflected
the panic of a doomed elite. Wrangel boasted that, after shooting
one red prisoner in ten, he would give the others the chance to
prove their "patriotism" and "atone for their sins" in battle.
Thus, most White soldiers were Red prisoners. What crushed the
White generals was not superior force of arms, but mass desertion,
mutiny and constant risings in occupied areas (Archangel, Ukraine,
Kuban etc.). The people rallied heroically to the Red Army, which
grew to become a militia of five million workers and peasants,
despite hardship and initial war weariness. Count Kidovstev could
offer the masses very little: "To start with, it is clear that you
must have a military dictatorship, and afterwards that might be
combined with a business element…" The Bolsheviks knew that
their ultimate strength lay in the common class interest of workers
everywhere. Their supreme task was the foundation in 1919 of the
Communist International, the world party of socialist revolution.
They granted autonomy and the rights of secession to all the
nations of the former Great Russian Empire. They chose to suffer
the humiliating terms of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with
Germany, ceding large areas of territory and provoking crises
within the Party and a government split with their Left SR allies,
rather than break the faith of the people and allow them to drift
into the clutches of the White terror. They made open appeals for
peace, renounced all claim to booty and annexations and published
the secret treaties, to expose to the workers the real interests of
the capitalist governments.

And once the intervention had begun, they greeted the enemy
soldiers with leaflets printed in all languages, explaining that
they had been sent by their bosses to crush a workers' republic,
reporting the news of the revolution raging throughout Europe, and
appealing for active help. This had an immediate effect on the
foreign war-weary workers in uniform. It was the invincible power of
workers' internationalism that saved the Russian Revolution. At one
point, only a small area surrounding Moscow and extending barely to
Petrograd had been in the hands of the Red Army. Russia was starved
of arms. Against twenty-one confident, well equipped armies
Russia could not have held out. But mutinies in the French fleet
stationed off Odessa, in the British, German, Czechoslovak and
other armies, came to the rescue. In Britain, the main contributor
to the intervention, the TUC condemned the Siberian occupation in
September 1919 - and Siberia was evacuated within days! General
Golovin reported on his negotiations with Winston Churchill in May
1919 as follows: "The question of giving armed support was for him
the most difficult one; the reason for this was the opposition of
the British working class to armed intervention…" In May 1920
the men in London's East India Docks refused to load the "Jolly
George" with hidden cachements of arms for Poland: mass
demonstrations were held throughout the country, and a joint
meeting of the TUC, the Labour Party NEC and the Parliamentary
Labour Party threatened a General Strike unless the intervention
was called off. The intervention stopped most abruptly and the Red
Army had no difficulty in clearing up the native Tsarist relics
within a few weeks. The revolution survived. The capitalist chain
around the globe had been decisively broken. The world revolution
had begun.

Retreat and Reaction

As Lenin explained, it was at its weakest link that the
imperialist chain had snapped. Indissolubly linked with the
peasantry, the most advanced working class in the world came to
power earliest in a country of age old backwardness, with little
industry, low productivity, long hours, mass illiteracy and per
capita income of about one tenth of that of the USA. Less than 10%
of the population were wage earners, and a much smaller proportion
were heavy industrial workers.

Three years of savage civil war had aggravated the problems
still further. In 1921 industrial production was down to one ninth
of the 1913 figure, and agricultural produce had slipped below the
pre-1900 level. Seven million homeless waifs roamed the country,
the people were starving and the peasants, thirsting for private
land and fair prices, were beginning to get restive once the
immediate danger of capitalist restoration had been removed. The
country had been forced to the stark emergency restrictions of War
Communism - "Communism in a besieged fortress", as Trotsky
described it. Grain requisitioning at bayonet point, famine which
led even to cannibalism, malaria, over-hasty nationalisation,
payment in kind, militarisation of labour, and the scarcity of
finance, technical expertise and spare parts - this was the price
paid to save the Soviet Republic. The peasantry revolted as soon as
the exigencies of war had ended. At Kronstadt the peasant sailors
mutinied, and riots broke out elsewhere. So critical was the
situation that the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 was compelled
to resort to the emergency expedient of temporarily forbidding
factions within the Party, in view of the danger of disintegration
presented by groupings like the Workers' Opposition - a measure
quite unprecedented, even at the moment of the October Revolution
itself.

The revolution in Russia had a Bolshevik Party, a cadre
steeled in long and varied experience and moulded over years of
principled education. The revolutionary efforts of the workers in
other countries were squandered by bad and often treacherous
leadership. The workers' victory internationally was delayed for a
whole period. An industrialised workers' state in the West would
have been able to assist Russia to the mutual benefit of both
countries, and the problem of the transition to socialism would
have been attenuated. It was necessary to consolidate the gains of
October in preparation for the resurgence of socialism in the West
and concessions had to be made to retain the support of the masses.
Hence the New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced by Lenin, who
frankly called it "a temporary retreat". Concessions were made to
peasants, minor private industrial concerns and foreign companies,
in order to encourage investment and to get the economy's wheels
moving again.

The failure of the German Revolution in 1923 (largely thanks to
the arrogant and bureaucratic behaviour of Stalin and Zinoviev)
marked a decisive turning point in the morale of the Russian
workers. The working class was ruling in conditions of terrible
weakness and exhaustion. Already a tiny section of the population,
it had been decimated by the World War, the intervention and the
famine, in which its most heroic and self-sacrificing fighters had
perished. It had to work long hours in the effort to reconstruct
the economy, which meant that democratic rule through Soviets
demanded superhuman sacrifice. (Lenin's first piece of advice to
the victorious Bavarian Communists had been to bring in a seven
hour working day, to give every worker the opportunity to
participate in administrative duties and check incipient
bureaucratism.) The Russian workers suffered agonies of
demoralisation at the defeat of the revolution in the West and were
nauseated at the sight of the "Nepmen" crawling out of the crevices
once War Communism was over - speculators, kulaks (rich peasants),
careerists, profiteers, black marketeers and bureaucrats. Mass
illiteracy forced society to rely on old administrators and
experts, many of them former counter-revolutionaries. That is why
Lenin announced that "we still have the same old Tsarist state
machine today, with a thin veneer of socialism spread on top."

In 1924 with the so-called "Lenin Levy", the party of October
was engulfed in a flood of careerism. The Workers' and Peasants'
Inspectorate (Rabkrin) set up to root out bureaucracy, under the
direction of Josef Stalin, was turned into an instrument for
putting hacks and routinists grateful to Stalin into key positions.
The first Party purge, initiated by Lenin, was aimed at ridding the
Party of non-proletarian elements; and to unite the Party at a time
of fierce controversy, the brooding Georgian non-entity Stalin, who
held no principled position either way, was temporarily elected
General Secretary.

Stalin was suspect for his long history of personal intrigue
inside the Party, and his opportunist position in 1917 while editor
of Pravda before Lenin's return (when he advocated fusion
with Mensheviks and a continuation of the war pending a German
mutiny - precisely the old social chauvinist excuse), but at this
time of backsliding and disintegration his gift for organisational
manoeuvring was appreciated. Lenin, speechless on his deathbed
after an unsuccessful assassination attempt and subsequent strokes,
began to conduct a bitter struggle to the last against Stalin and
the emboldened bureaucracy he represented.

Increasingly aware of the powerful machine Stalin was
constructing, the blatant growth of careerism and red tape, the
deception and intrigue he personally suffered at Stalin's hands and
hearing of the Great Russian chauvinist repression of Georgia, he
broke off all relations with Stalin, formed an anti-bureaucratic
bloc with Trotsky and sent a testament to the Party Congress urging
Stalin's removal from his post. This letter was suppressed and
denounced for years as a "Trotskyist forgery" until its publication
in Moscow after Khrushchev's "de-Stalinisation" speech of 1956.
Such was Lenin's tenacity and dedication that he was again slowly
beginning to recover - until his sudden and mysterious death in
January 1924. There seems little doubt that Stalin was at least
partially responsible for this tragedy. This ambitious mediocrity
had gained a key position and if the formidable Lenin were to
recover, his career would be over.

Stalin did not create the reaction - he was its most lethal
expression, and once created, he prolonged it. Bureaucratic
degeneration under one dictator or another was inevitable, given
the isolation of the revolution; but Stalin was anxious to play the
leading role himself. If he had known that this road would lead him
to the murder of all his old comrades, and the betrayal of the
world revolution, he would never have started along it. But the
shrewd Georgian proceeded pragmatically, taking the line of least
resistance at every turn; and this made him as ideal a focus for
the whole of the Soviet bureaucracy as Lenin and Trotsky had been
brilliant leaders of the revolutionary working class.

Socialism in One Country

While canonising Lenin as a saint, renaming Petrograd
"Leningrad", storing his body in the Mausoleum as an icon to be
venerated by the peasants, and invoking his authority for all
Stalin's perversions of Marxism, Stalin suddenly tore up the whole
heritage of Leninism by announcing the building of "Socialism in a
single country." Over decades of free polemic within the labour
movement, it had not occurred to a single grouping ever even to
mention the idea of socialism within the borders of Russia alone.
Scientific socialism had emerged in opposition to the utopians who
had believed that socialism could be created merely by the will of
individuals. Marx and Engels had hammered home the basic lesson
that it was the historic task of capitalism to create the material
prerequisites of socialism, namely, the technological basis for an
economy of superabundance, and the grave diggers of capitalism, a
concentrated and propertyless industrial proletariat.

Capitalism unified the world into a single economic unit with an
international division of labour. They wrote in the Communist
Manifesto that "modern industry had established the world
market…In place of the old local and national seclusion and
self-sufficiency, we now have the many-sided intercourse of nations
and their universal interdependence." Engels later admonished the
French socialist Lafargue: "The emancipation of the proletariat can
be only an international event. You make it impossible if you try
to make it a purely French event." How much more impossible to make
it a purely Russian event!

Lenin emphasised that "without aid from the international world
revolution, a victory of the proletarian revolution is
impossible…We did our utmost to preserve the Soviet system
under any circumstances and at all costs, because we knew that we
are working not only for ourselves, but also for the international
revolution." At the critical moment of the civil war in 1920, Lenin
wrote his Left Wing Communism, specifically in order to
correct errors in other sections of the Communist International. He
was prepared to lose power in backward Russia if it were necessary
in order to successfully take power in industrial Germany.

Stalin himself said as late as in 1924, repeating Lenin, that
"for the final victory of socialism, for the organisation of
socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of
such a peasant country as Russia, are insufficient. For this the
efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are
necessary." He abandoned internationalism to appease the Nepmen,
the small capitalists and the careerists who had found a snug niche
within the bureaucracy, as well as to foreign capitalist
governments from whom favours were sought. Stalin explicitly
abandoned all interest in the world revolution.

For society to inscribe on its banner "from each according to
his ability, to each according to his need," it must have at its
disposal highly developed technological resources to provide for
the needs of all. Capitalism on a world scale has created such
resources. No single unit of the world economy can opt out. In a
country as backward as Russia was, food, clothing and housing were
inadequate, and where there is shortage there is inequality. Marx
said: "A development of the productive forces is the absolutely
necessary practical premise [of socialism] because without it want
is generalised and with want the struggle for necessities begins
again, and that means that all the old crap must revive." A
policeman is needed to control a food queue, as Trotsky explained,
and he will always see to it that he eats first and best. In the
peculiar circumstances in which the revolution was isolated for a
whole period to backward Russia, the state, far from withering
away, rose to domination over the masses. For the workers, the only
solution was aid to the world revolution. For bureaucrats with a
stake in the status quo, it was "Socialism in one country." They
were satisfied with the position as it was, their privileges and
power were secure.

The new course was accompanied by a vicious campaign against
"Trotskyism" on the part of Stalin (abetted initially by Zinoviev
and Kamenev) using all the Stalinist paraphernalia that later
became notorious; the falsification of history, the police spies at
Party meetings, the slanders and vilifications, the mass
expulsions, the blackmail, assassinations and forced suicides. The
mediocrity who had hypocritically donned the mantle of Lenin was to
transform himself, not into a revolutionary teacher, but into an
Oriental despot. Lenin's widow Krupskaya commented as early as 1927
that, "if Vladimir Ilyich were alive today he would be in one of
Stalin's jails." No single revolutionary would have been able to
resist the deluge of reaction.

From 1923 onwards the Left Opposition campaigned for workers'
democracy and internationalism, not with any hope of easy
successes, but with a determination to reaffirm the programme of
Bolshevism, to survive as a rallying point when the tide would turn
and socialism could take further strides forward.

Liberal historians eagerly point out that "every revolution is
followed by reaction." Nothing changes after a revolution, they
gloat, so why bother? Marx's reply was that "history is not a
vicious circle, but a spiral." Certain historic gains survive in
the teeth of reaction. In revolution, the masses invade the arena
of history to change their position in society. At every stage they
move further to the left in their break with the past, until they
come up against objective obstacles which block their path. In
earlier revolutions, where the only future lay in capitalism (which
would prepare the material conditions for socialism) the extreme
plebian left wing always dissipated its energies in the end. Mass
demoralisation would then set in, and a military dictatorship would
place itself above society, ruling in the last analysis by leaning
on the capitalists against the populace.

In Russia, after the masses had arrived at a supreme
revolutionary consciousness, their will was smashed against the
rocks of the failure of the revolution in all the advanced
countries. Backward Russia was condemned to stand alone in a
capitalist world, in conditions too primitive to permit a smooth
transition to socialism. Again there followed what Marx termed
Bonapartist rule - rule by the sword, based on the balance between
the Nepmen and the world bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and the
workers and peasants of Russia, on the other. But at this time
capitalism on a world scale had exhausted all its possibilities of
developing society, so the restoration of private property did not
ensue. A military police state raised itself above the people, but
still it stood for the main gains of the revolution: the
nationalisation of the means of production, which remained the
source of its privileges. The bureaucracy fed parasitically on the
body of the planned economy. Though to maintain its position it
denied the workers democratic control and thus severely limited the
potential strength of the plan, it had no alternative but to defend
state ownership. The world saw the new phenomenon of Stalinism, or
proletarian Bonapartism.

Zinoviev and Kamenev broke with Stalin in 1925 on the issue of
"Socialism in one country", so glaringly opposed to all the
teachings of Marx and Lenin. As always taking the line of least
resistance, Stalin lined up with the right (Bukharin, Rykov and
Tomsky) who advocated further concessions to private enterprise.
"Socialism at a snail's pace" became the Party motto. Stalin
promised "forty years of private ownership of the land" and
Bukharin's curt advice to the kulaks was, "Get rich!" Industry
stagnated as the new regime leaned on the Nepmen to strike blows
against the workers, the bureaucracy's principal stumbling block.
Although the standard of living in 1929 was already 25% higher than
in 1913, it was not until 1928 that production actually reached the
1913 level. Whereas Lenin had popularised the need for
industrialisation with the slogan "socialism equals electrification
plus soviet power", Stalin sneered at the Dnieprstroy dam project -
it was like "giving a muzhik a gramophone instead of a cow." Wages
were depressed to reduce the morale of the workers, bureaucrats
became entrenched in the factories, Soviet control was abolished.
The right of workers to hire and fire their managers was inverted.
Democratic centralism was superseded by bureaucratic despotism.

Only in 1927 did Stalin prudently make a concession to the
workers, in order to pacify them while he suppressed the
Opposition. The working day was reduced to seven hours, without
loss of pay, a gain very soon to be swept away during the Five Year
Plan. Workers who were suspected of supporting the Opposition were
blacklisted, and as many as a million were unemployed in 1927, when
courageous demonstrations were held in defence of the Opposition in
Moscow and Leningrad. The excuse was used to expel all the hardened
Oppositionists from the Party, including Lenin's main
comrade-in-arms since the April Days of 1917 - Leon Trotsky, who
was arrested and sent into exile.

Stalin had come out of obscurity into power against the
background of the defeat of the German Revolution of 1923. It was
the failure of the British General Strike in 1926 and then of the
Chinese workers' revolution of 1927 that deepened the
demoralisation of the workers and thus allowed Stalin to withdraw
the last rights of the Left Opposition. Stalin's blatantly
Menshevik and opportunist policy in China had led him to order the
Chinese Communists against their will to support the capitalist
party of Chiang Kai-Shek. Hundreds of thousands of workers perished
in the ensuing bloodbath. To those of Trotsky's supporters who
thought that this would finally expose Stalin to the masses and
vindicate the programme of the Opposition, Trotsky pointed out
that, although this might be the effect with individual Communists,
for the masses generally the decisive factor would be the defeat of
the revolution, whatever the reason. The reaction would be
enormously strengthened by their further demoralisation. The new
triumphs of counter-revolution in Germany, France and Spain were
finally to reinforce the tyranny of the Stalinist bureaucracy in
Russia.

The Plan and the Purges

The kulaks took Bukharin's advice to "get rich" so literally
that soon they presented a real danger of capitalist restoration.
They were hoarding grain, gold and even arms. The bureaucracy has
to stand guard in the last analysis over the nationalised economy
against the attacks of capitalism and will tolerate no rivals for
its privileges. Stalin panicked and switched overnight to an
adventurist policy of "complete collectivisation". Where Lenin and
Trotsky had urged the establishment of voluntary model collectives
on the basis of industry and tractors and gradual "collectivisation
by example", Stalin on the basis of the primitive wooden plough
used for 1,000 years shifted his base to a demagogic mobilisation
of workers and soldiers, to force the peasants off their plots at
bayonet point. The peasants responded by slaughtering their
livestock and burning their crops. As a result of this insane
ultra-left policy ten million died in the subsequent famine.
Industry meanwhile lurched forward in the first Five Year Plan,
which was far more ambitious than the projects so caustically
ridiculed by Stalin only months before. The adventurist slogan
"Fulfil the plan in four years" wrought havoc in the economy.

The economy was still too backward to permit gross luxuries to
the bureaucrats. The maximum wage differential of 4:1 was not
formally abolished until 1931 and a general was court-martialled as
late as in 1931 for having had his boots cleaned by a private. The
officialdom had to be purged of those who were too hasty in their
greed. A demagogic "campaign against bureaucratism" was needed to
galvanise it into action in developing the economy. In the sharp
"left turn", Stalin's long-standing allies and relative theoretical
giants Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were expelled and soon arrested.
Many who had supported the Left Opposition were disorientated and
deceived by the bureaucracy's new shift of balance. The new change
in line was reflected in the crude "third period" of the Comintern,
which split the working class by declaring (in Stalin's inimitable
turn of phrase) that "Social Democracy and Fascism are not
antipodes but twins." "Social Fascism" was a grotesque mockery of
Leninism, which weakened the labour movement in the face of bitter
reaction. It was this policy, arrogantly imposed on all the parties
of the Comintern, which split the German workers so disastrously
that Hitler was able to seize power without so much as smashing a
window pane, although three million workers were still armed after
fifteen years of heroic efforts to overthrow capitalism. The slide
towards reaction was accelerated, as Stalin led the revolutionary
workers up the blind alleys, first of Menshevism, then of
ultra-leftism and soon afterwards of open class collaboration.

While the capitalist world was paralysed by the worst slump in
its history, the Soviet economy took gigantic strides forward - a
superb vindication of planned production. Meanwhile the paradoxes
within Soviet society began to intensify. The way was clear for
official salaries and perks to swell and the idea of maintaining a
strict control on differentials was dismissed as a "fetish of petty
bourgeois egalitarians"!

The isolation of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent
exhaustion of the Russian workers were the sole objective basis of
the rise of the bureaucracy. The failures of the German Revolution
of 1923 and the Chinese Revolution of 1927 and the rise of Fascism
in Germany in 1933, all mainly results of Stalin's bureaucratic
centrism and his gross political blunders, all strengthened the
Stalinist degeneration.

The bureaucracy began to grow aware of its debt to the defeats
in the West, and from then onwards the Comintern was used directly
to avert revolutions which would have ignited the dampened
revolutionary ardour of the Russian workers and ended the rule of
the totalitarian clique for ever. The essential reactionary content
of "Socialism in one country" came to the surface. The Communist
Parties were transformed, in Trotsky's words, from vanguards of
world revolution to frontier guards of the Soviet union. But the
workers needed the destruction of all frontiers in a world
socialist federation. The revolutionary workers of Spain, who had
occupied the factories, were forced by Stalin to hand over power to
the abandoned liberal mask of a capitalist class that had in
reality long since torn it off and gone over to Franco. The
Comintern in public eyes had inherited the authority of October. In
fact, the "Popular Front" was a trick imposed by the gravediggers
of October. Cynical betrayal and fear of revolution was from then
on the basis of Comintern policy. In 1943 Stalin finally dissolved
the Comintern as a friendly gesture to his imperialist allies.

As the Spanish workers made one attempt after another to take
power, the growing Soviet working class began to sense again the
whiff of world revolution in its nostrils and to resist
bureaucratic encroachments. That was why the terror was unleashed,
to entrench the totalitarian state, to draw a river of blood
between October and today. After the Kirov assassination frame-up
in 1934 a series of ghastly trials and "confessions" was staged. An
entire generation of old Bolsheviks was wiped out (crimes recently
admitted by Stalin's own daughter). The old Tsarist state machine
warned against by Lenin asserted its supremacy through the "purges"
by obliterating the revolutionaries and distorting the whole
heritage of Bolshevism. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, Radek,
Rakovsky and a number of other old revolutionaries "confessed" to
being lifelong imperialist agents. Their "accuser" Vyshinsky was an
old Menshevik lawyer who had collaborated with the White
counter-revolution. Out of the Central Committee of the Party of
October 1917 only two survived: Kollontai, as a diplomat - and
Josef Stalin. Among the entire early Party membership, only a few
of Stalin's hand-picked proteges and hatchetmen were left - the
Molotovs, Kaganovitches, Mikoyans and Voroshilovs. The
transformation of the Party from the vanguard of the revolutionary
workers to a lever in the bureaucratic apparatus was at last
complete. Between 1939 and 1952 there was not a single Party
Congress - and even during the Civil War this supreme body of any
Bolshevik organisation had met to hammer out a common policy.

Every murder had to be covered up with ten more; the consecutive
police butchers Yagoda and Yezhov themselves drowned in the blood
they had spilt. For every economic bungle, and they were inevitable
without the democratic control of the workers, scapegoats had to be
found. Every day another group of officials branded themselves as
paid counter-revolutionaries. Bolshevik workers and light-fingered
bureaucrats perished alike in the bloodbath. Beloved figures like
the writer Gorky, whose connections with October were uncomfortably
close, disappeared mysteriously. Literature (and especially drama
in conditions of mass illiteracy) had played an important role in
mass communication since the revolution. It stood opposed to rule
by ukaz; so it was brutally suppressed and a generation of geniuses
was exterminated. Anybody who had even the most tenuous connections
with October was "liquidated", even some of Stalin's aides and
accomplices in distorting the heritage of Bolshevism. Denunciations
and informers were encouraged and every friend or relative of any
suspected malcontent was imprisoned. In the mass paranoia, every
zealous policeman found as many victims as could be manufactured,
to avoid denunciation himself.

Just before the German invasion, the whole of the General Staff
was arrested and brilliant strategists like Tukachevsky, Yakir,
Samarnik, from the Civil War days, were executed to avert the
danger of a coup d'etat. Hundreds of thousands were shot and
millions sent to concentration camps, while Stalin solemnly
condemned them all as spies, assassins and wreckers, "fiends" and
most heinous of all - "Trotsky-Fascists". The economy was so
uprooted that for two years production remained the same. The
bureaucracy had protected its usurpation of the revolution's
traditions by what Trotsky aptly described as "a one-sided
preventive civil war." Trotsky was tracked down and murdered in
Mexico in 1940. The opposition was wiped out. The last vestiges of
popular control were obliterated.

It had been suddenly announced after the first plan that
"socialism" had been already achieved, and that social classes no
longer existed. The co-operative peasantry had "merged" with the
proletariat. To those who dared to wonder why the class struggle
against "Trotsky-Fascism" had been so violent during the 1930s if
classes had disappeared, the enigmatic answer was given that "under
socialism class contradictions do not die down, they become
sharper." Anyone who further challenged this statement was shot as
an obvious saboteur.

In reality the last rights of the workers had vanished. They
could not change their jobs at will. Fines, unpaid labour and
deportation were the penalties for lateness. Strict supervision was
maintained in the factories and the vicious sweated labour system
of "Stakhanovism" was imposed, whereby every worker had to achieve
the quota fixed by the "shock worker" who obtained lucrative
rewards. Industry was stifled by a monolithic hierarchy. Every
decision had to run the gauntlet of committees within each
ministry, from brigade, shop, department, firm, trust, chief
committee, Ministry, Economic Council, to the Council of Ministers
of the USSR. Every official at each rung of the ladder was
understandably afraid to take any initiative for which he might be
blamed, and he passed the buck on to his superior. The tiniest
problems took months to solve and there was a wasteful duplication
and imbalance between the Ministries. The plan nevertheless
achieved tremendous results. Society was developed, but at three
times the cost under capitalism.

The lunacy of "collectivisation overnight" held agriculture
back. Even when the tractors were at last produced, so little
attention had been given to raising the cultural level of the
peasants correspondingly that tractors that had run out of petrol
were left to rust in the fields while applications were sent up for
new ones! Concessions were granted permitting the cultivation of
private strips and the collectives were starved of labour as a
result.

Meanwhile, the huge reserves of slave labour in the
concentration camps were used as an auxiliary to paid labour in
the economy, to construct the great installations that formed the
basis of Soviet industrial might - the dams and hydro-electric
power stations at Bratsk, Magnitogorsk, Dnieprstroy, etc. When
Khrushchev eloquently talked in 1956 of erecting monuments to
Stalin's countless victims, one ex-inmate of a labour camp
commented bitterly: "All he'd need to do is paint all the dams and
power stations black!"

Stalinism in War

The terrible defeats of the workers in the West made war
inevitable. Panic-stricken at the prospect, Stalin made opportunist
deals first with the "democratic" imperialist states, then with
Nazi Germany, thereby precipitating the outbreak of war. "We don't
want an inch of your territory," he told the imperialists, "but
don't push your swinish snouts into our beautiful Soviet garden."
On the world arena as at home, he maintained a precarious balance
by pragmatic manoeuvres, playing off hostile forces in constant
zig-zags. So trusting was he in Hitler's promises, as Krushchev
revealed, that, faced first with intelligence reports and later
with the actual German invasion, Stalin refused to believe that he
had been tricked. While German tanks were rolling into the USSR,
Stalin urged against any kind of resistance. This must be the
mistake of one stray unit, he said, and it would be dangerous to
provoke Hitler's retaliation! When it was quite clear that a
full-scale invasion had begun, he sulked and vanished from Moscow
for three weeks, lamenting that "all that Lenin built is lost!"
With 80% of the officer caste "purged", in the absence of any
capable military command Zhukov and Rokossovsky were released from
jail.

Popular legend suggests that it was Stalin who won the war. But
Krushchev revealed that countless unnecessary casualties were
caused by the colossal and obstinate blunders of the "wise
Generalissimo", against the desperate advice of his officers. The
clear internationalism of the Civil War days was replaced by the
poisonous chauvinism of the "Glorious Patriotic War". German
workers who had been trying for fifteen years to achieve revolution
and been betrayed by their leaders, workers in uniform languishing
under the heel of Fascism, were slandered as "Nazis". "The only
good German is a dead German," screamed the "Communist" newspapers.
But the Soviet workers and peasants rallied heroically to defend
their revolution, and at the appalling cost of 20 million lives and
30% of the national wealth, they were victorious.

The main concern of the Kremlin once the invasion had been
beaten back was to dampen down a revolutionary wave similar to the
one following the First World War, which would have broken the
isolation of the first socialist revolution and struck at the
objective roots of Stalinism. The power of internationalism had
been proven by the work of the French Trotskyists who had won over
entire regiments of German soldiers. The Communist partisans in
Eastern Europe, like the Communist underground resistance movements
in France and Italy, constituted the sole authority following
Hitler's defeat and the terrified flight of the entirely
collaborationist capitalist class. The world civil war already
unfolding was smothered, though capitalism was impotent, thanks to
the collusion of the Kremlin. But after the Second, as after the
First World War, the Russian revolution was saved by the
revolutionary mood of the masses. Churchill and Roosevelt, who had
planned to finish off Russia after it had defeated Germany, were
unable to use troops against the Chinese Revolution, let alone
Russia. They contented themselves with an atom bomb dropped on
Japan as a warning to Russia.

Stalin at Yalta and Potsdam traded "spheres of influence" with
Roosevelt, betraying the revolution in the West and stabbing the
Greek workers in the back. In liberated Czechoslovakia, Poland,
Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania and Eastern Germany he artificially
counter-weighted the workers' embryonic Soviet power with the
"Popular Front" trick used in Spain. Reactionary politicians,
propped up not by the capitalists, who had fled, but by the
bayonets of the Red Army, were imposed on "national" governments.
Slice by slice the reactionaries were whittled away by what Rakosi
of Hungary called the "salami tactic" and the regime leaned on the
workers to nationalise the economy. Only the peasant armies of Tito
in Yugoslavia and Mao in China were able to ignore the dictates of
Moscow and there too the revolution was carried through in the same
Bonapartist fashion.

Deformed workers' states in the image of Moscow,
bureaucratically disfigured from their very inception, were created
on the backs, either of the Red Army or of independent peasant
armies. A period of rapacious plunder opened up; between 1945 and
1956 about $20,000,000,000 were pumped out of Eastern Europe in
unequal trade terms, "war reparations" squeezed from workers and
peasants to pay for the crimes of their old oppressors, etc. The
first break in the Stalinist ranks came when the relatively
independent Tito bureaucracy levered itself out from under Moscow's
hold by making separate trade deals with imperialist countries.
Political turmoil in Eastern Europe and the shattering break with
China lay not far ahead.

Stalinism Without Stalin

The war devastation was overcome within five years, not with
Marshall "Aid", but by planned use of available resources and the
peoples' unstintingly strenuous efforts. The machine was
monolithic. The country was flushed with military triumph and
jubilation at the tremendous blows struck against capitalism in
whole areas of Europe and Asia. A wholly new correlation of forces
was emerging inside the Soviet Union, with a growing and confident
working class. Education and technique shot forward, and illiteracy
had been practically wiped out.

The crimes weighing on Stalin's conscience were beginning to
take their toll on his mind. Terrified by the undercurrents of
opposition to the old despotic methods, he prepared to reply with a
new era of purge terror. On the outbreak of the "Cold War", to
retain a bogey and a pretext for totalitarian methods, resident
emigres (mostly starry-eyed Stalinists) were rounded up and
imprisoned. Stalin accused his faithful puppet Voroshilov of being
a British spy; the paranoic "Doctors' plot" scare story was drummed
up and, accompanied by his sinister police chief Beria, Stalin
dropped ominous hints that he planned to "liquidate" most of the
present leadership of the Party. The Party bosses trembled in their
shoes. Few of them would last much longer. But it was not mere
individual self-interest that worried them. A new round of purge
trials, denunciations and arrests under the new conditions was
suicidal lunacy for the whole of their caste.

No longer the primitive economy of the past, the USSR was
emerging as the second super-power in the world. About half the
population now lived in the towns. The education and morale of the
working class was high. What was needed was not an intensification
of the terror, which would have provoked dangerous upheavals and
utterly sabotaged the progress of the economy (as it had in
1938-40) but "liberal" reforms from above to prevent political
revolution from below. Stalin had to be removed if the bureaucracy
was to remain at the helm. Suddenly and unexpectedly, one night in
1953, Stalin met his death. And even if he was not murdered, then
certainly his death came at a convenient moment for the forces he
had represented.

The old methods were strangling further growth. The use of slave
labour was enormously wasteful, especially so of the most important
productive force - human labour-power itself. Sweated labour in the
factories was likewise uneconomic, with the relatively advanced
techniques of modern industry. It was necessary somehow to remove
the fear that gripped the lower echelons of the officialdom, to
stimulate more initiative from below. Stalin's death heralded
political turmoil. It was as if a stifling deadweight had been
lifted; all the long accumulated tensions burst out into the open.
Crisis at the top (as the leaders intrigued for power the secret
police faction was brought to heel and Beria was shot) was
accompanied by powerful upheavals at the bottom - mass uprisings in
the labour camps; clamouring in the factories for an end to
Stakhanovism, piecework, and dictatorial methods of production
supervision; riots and insurrections throughout Eastern Europe and
an unstemmable flow of questioning and criticism of sweeping
dimensions, from the intellectuals.

An amnesty was granted to all, except political
prisoners. Time and motion experts were sent into the factories to
calculate more realistic production norms and the workers seized
the opportunity to slow down their work rate, so that on an average
day the "norm" could be easily exceeded and bonuses could be
gained. Wages were raised and some elementary rights restored. The
"thaw" was cautiously introduced as a safety valve. The monolithic
system of industrial mix-management was replaced by a new
"decentralised" division of the country into "Economic Councils"
(Sovnarkhozi). And to consolidate the new tactic Khrushchev made
his famous "de-Stalinisation" speech at a secret session of the
Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, reviling the man he and all his
fellow upstarts had grovelled before throughout their careers.
Stalingrad became "Volgograd". The whole country, and all the loyal
and long-suffering foreign Stalinists reeled from the shock of this
sudden disavowal.

But no hint of explanation was forthcoming as to the objective
basis of the "personality cult"; what social interests this
monstrous tyrant had represented and why the population of a
"socialist" country had had no control or check on its leaders for
thirty years. The revelations were never even published inside the
USSR. Apart from the demotion of a handful of top level "diehards"
(Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovitch) trying to steer the Party back on
to an obsolete course, there was absolutely no reorganisation or
even re-staffing of the admittedly corrupt apparatus. And although
one or two of the more innocuous nonentities Stalin had happened to
catch in the sweep of his hand were "rehabilitated", not one word
was published of the writings of a single Bolshevik who had died
fighting for Leninist principles. Stalinism merely dropped its
trade mark in order to retain its iron grip for a little
longer.

Cracks in the Monolith

By an irony of history, it was only a matter of months before
Khrushchev was forced to demonstrate to the whole world how little
had really changed. Following stormy rumblings of revolt in East
Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, the Hungarian Revolution of
1956 blazed into history. The programme of Bolshevism can never be
buried while the working class continues to suffer oppression or
exploitation. The Hungarian workers fought spontaneously for
Lenin's 1919 programme against bureaucratisation: workers'
management and control through Soviets; a maximum wage differential
of 4:1; election of all officials with right of recall; abolition
of the standing army and its replacement by a workers' militia;
freedom of expression and association for all except capitalist
counterrevolutionaries; immediate withdrawal of all armies of
occupation. Within weeks all Hungary rallied around these demands.
Two general strikes and two insurrections (before and after
intervention) received 100% solid support. The peasants formed farm
Soviets. The students and intellectuals, grouped around the Petofi
circle, gave the workers enthusiastic assistance. The munitions
workers provided arms and the soldiers fraternised. Even the lower
levels of the bureaucracy swung into support of the new workers'
government. Like generals without an army, the top bureaucracy
found itself suspended helplessly in mid-air. The Soviet soldiers
stationed in Hungary refused point blank to turn their guns on to
workers struggling against brutal Stalinist repression and victory
seemed secure.

Terrified at the prospect that the shining example of
revolutionary Hungary, pointing forward the real road to socialism,
would bring Stalinism crashing to its downfall in the USSR itself,
Khrushchev hastily withdrew all the Soviet troops already stationed
in Hungary and posted them to remote barracks inside Russia where
they could not tell of the political revolution they had witnessed.
Backward Mongolian troops were sent in to replace them, ignorant of
the truth, encased in gigantic tanks, and informed in many cases
that they were fighting the Anglo-French Imperialists at Suez and
even that they were back in Berlin fighting the Nazis! Hungarian
workers, crushed for twenty five years under Admiral Horthy's White
terror and struggling once again for socialism, were slandered as
"fascists". But the general strike has never been a favourite
weapon of fascists, and imperialist agents proved unable to gain
any foothold. Workers who have successfully wrested the factories
from the control of privileged bureaucrats are hardly likely to
hand them over to private capitalists for their own exploitation
and if the Hungarian workers' slogans were "fascist", then so were
Lenin's!

Although the first political revolution in a deformed workers'
state was drowned in blood, the lessons of the experience were
impossible to obscure. A clique desperately anxious to shed its old
totalitarian image had been compelled to prove that Great Russian
chauvinism and fear of the working class still dominated its
actions. On the other hand, within weeks the workers of Hungary had
returned afresh to the banner of internationalism and workers'
democracy. Their demands were identical to those predicted by
Trotsky for the coming political revolution in Russia. Hungary
outlined the shape of things to come - and Khrushchev proved he
knew it.

It was not long before the international monolith began
decisively to crack open. The Chinese Revolution which finally
achieved power in 1949, loomed as a threat to Russian Stalinism
from its very inception. After Stalin had betrayed the Chinese
workers in 1927 into the brutal hands of the Chiang dictatorship,
the Chinese Party leaders took to the hills and organised the land
hungry peasants into a guerrilla army, which succeeded after 20
years in driving the rotten despotism into the sea. The Maoist
clique at the head had no October tradition of Soviet power to
contend with, and operated as a Stalinist regime from the outset.
First the rifles of the peasantry were turned on to the urban
workers to consolidate the bureaucracy and placate the capitalists
(who were paid long term dividends as compensation for
nationalisation) then on to the landlords with a demagogic
mobilisation of the toiling masses. The workers' states in Asia as
in Eastern Europe were bureaucratically deformed from the
beginning. But in China these developments took place in rebellion
against the decrees of Stalin, who urged compromise even after the
US Ambassador in China had reported home that victory belonged to
Mao. The greatest defeat for world capitalism since October 1917
received not a nod of acknowledgement from the Kremlin until it was
a fait accompli.

Stalin and his successors, anxious for "normal" relations and a
rapprochement with US Imperialism, offered no real
protection to the new workers' state and when the Camp David sell
out in 1957 provoked the Chinese bureaucracy into outright
opposition, Khrushchev suddenly withdrew all Soviet technicians,
tore up all the agreements and even spitefully burnt all the
blueprints, thus dealing China a crippling blow. China began to
agitate against Soviet hegemony in the international Stalinist
movement - not from the standpoint of the world revolution, but in
the doomed attempt to construct an Asiatic caricature of the
pre-war Comintern, an international network of Chinese
frontier-guards. Despite the Maoists' long experience of Stalin's
treachery and double-dealing, they counter-balanced their attack on
Soviet "revisionism" with idolatry of Stalin. Within their "sphere
of influence" they played the same game of power-politics as Stalin
had before them. Their advice to the three-million strong
Indonesian Communist Party to support the "progressive" dictator
Sukarno was as opportunist and as disastrous as Stalin's orders to
themselves in 1925-27. Their friendship towards the deposed Imam of
Yemen and the Sultan of Zanzibar, their support of Ayub Khan's
dictatorship in Pakistan, their ridiculous attempt to compete with
the mighty USSR in deals with ruling cliques in the colonial
countries, all ape the colossal cynicism of Stalin's manoeuvres.
Stalinism in marked contrast to Bolshevism, proved incapable of
transcending national barriers.

The Bureaucratic Impasse

The schism with China brought to its clearest expression the
petty nationalism of the bureaucracies of all the deformed workers'
states. In place of internationalism, unity, planned economic
dovetailing and harmonious integration to the mutual benefit of the
workers of all these countries, the leaders of each little state
strove for a bureaucratic utopia of autarchy and self-sufficiency.
COMECON was mainly a machine for "integration" in the interests of
its strongest national member-state. Its division of labour
confined Romania to the role of Russia's bread-bin, Bulgaria its
fruit-basket, etc. On the basis of federation there would be no
harm in such a division of labour. Imposed by the Russian national
bureaucracy at prices never better than those of the capitalist
world market, while national barriers remain, it is fundamentally
reactionary.

In reply to this plunder, each national clique sought to develop
an entirely national economy, with its own infra-structure,
preserving the ridiculous old frontiers of the Balkan states, etc.
Czechoslovakia, with a population of 14 million, seriously
attempted to develop an entire national heavy industry, with
ball-bearings plants, electronic computers, and so on. Little
Romania tried equally impossible adventures. With a federation of
workers' states of Europe and Asia, the difficulties in attracting
manpower to develop rich Eastern Siberia could have been overcome.
The old monolithism has been superseded by fragmentation.
Yugoslavia, fifteen years ago the black sheep of the family, has
been imitated by little Albania, Romania, Poland and all the others
in a chaotic maze of national roads to socialism. Precisely similar
policies, when practised by Kosygin's miniature versions in the
Union republic governments, were condemned by Kosygin for their
"real parochial approach, a harmful and absolutely impermissible
phenomenon in our socialist state." The USSR heroically demands
"internationalism" from all except itself. The split with China
provides each national bureaucracy with a new dimension in which to
balance between opposing forces, playing off each side against the
other. Meanwhile, the sharp shocks of the Twentieth Congress,
Hungary and the Sino-Soviet split have finally shattered the iron
grip of the Kremlin on the world's Communist Parties. As Soviet
"frontier-guards" they are today of doubtful use. In part they have
become reserve teams of reformist statesmen, and only partially do
they remain agents of the Russian bureaucracy.

It was the inability of the leaders to live up to the plan's
potential even within the boundaries of the USSR which brought the
1964 coup and Khrushchev's downfall. The new faceless "technocrats"
Kosygin, Brezhnev and Podgorny talked scathingly of "economic
voluntarism and subjectivism" which signified in official jargon
the figurehead "Khrushchev" just as surely as "the cult of the
personality" meant "Stalin". The line was changed and the smears
were flung - but the same social caste clung on to power.

Although the Soviet national income had risen by 570% between
1945 and 1964 (compared to a corresponding figure of 55% in the
USA), the economy faced serious crisis. Bureaucratic control was
becoming a greater and greater impediment to progress, as the ever
more complex economy got more and more clogged up with red tape.
Unable to provide adequate consumer goods, food or housing
facilities to a dedicated and long-suffering working class, unable
to live up to past performance even in developing industry, the
bureaucracy was putting a question-mark over its very existence in
the minds of the workers.

Khrushchev had tried to rationalise the hierarchical structure
of industry by veering towards "decentralisation". This meant, not
voluntary self-abolition by the bureaucrats, but a relative
transfer of initiative between them. Instead of one monolithic
bureaucracy, Russia had to contend with sixteen little
bureaucracies, one for each of the Union republics. The pettier
parasites indulged in a binge of swindling and wholesale plunder.
The containment of the police terror had heralded the age of
unbridled licence for the corrupt officialdom. Grossly exaggerated
output reports were sent, in return for handsome bonuses, and there
was chaos in the planning offices. Some of the more glaring
anomalies of "centralised" control were at first corrected (e.g.
the transportation of materials thousands of miles when they were
required next door, etc.) but soon even more ludicrous problems
were created by the needless duplication of investment and even of
scientific research within each "Economic Council". Not
internationalism but minuscule parochialism became the unit of
planning. In 1960 the death penalty was reintroduced for "economic
crimes". One poor scapegoat for the crimes of his caste was found
to have hoarded one million roubles by profiteering and pilfering.
The central bureaucracy stepped firmly back in the manner of
Stalin, to punish the most conspicuous parasites and thus stabilise
their rule.

In capitalist countries workers have no direct stake in raising
productivity. It is a synonym for intensified exploitation and mass
unemployment. In a planned and publicly-owned economy, where
production is not restricted by the market and there are no private
shareholders amassing the fruits of the workers' unpaid labour,
higher productivity is the only road to shorter hours, higher wages
and the achievement of "Communism" (which Khrushchev rashly
promised "by 1980" - a question on which his successors are
conspicuously vague). The workers watch the statistics keenly. But
the bureaucrats lounging behind their desks have the sole ambition
of some day stepping another rung up the ladder; each one is
responsible only to a superior standing even further away from the
masses and so on ad infinitum. Proposals sent down for the
installation of new technique, the implementation of new designs,
or other rationalisation of labour, get lost at the bottom of the
"in" tray of some bureaucrat who only wants to avoid extra
paperwork that would disturb his peace of mind. The only section of
the population with a direct interest in the economy's progress -
the workers - are kept desperately at arms' length from management,
in the justified fear that they might question the inflated
salaries and expense-accounts paid with their labour.

The seven-year plan (1959-65) was in trouble. In agriculture, in
many indices of industrial output, in the key index of labour
productivity itself, the targets were not to be fulfilled.
Inexorably the rise of industrial productivity slowed down, and
with it the growth of real income. Between 1956 and 1960 the
average annual rate of growth of industrial productivity was 6.5%.
Between 1961 and 1965 it had slowed down to 4.6%. By comparison
with, say, Britain's snail-pace advance, this is still a great
performance. But workers have a right to expect incomparably better
results from a planned economy, and in the Soviet context, which at
one time achieved annual rises of 10%, these figures are
disturbing. Despite the breakneck speed of its growth in the past
fifty years, surpassing the whole of Western Europe, Soviet
industrial productivity today is still admitted to be only "40-50%"
of that of the USA. With a larger working class, with over twice
the number of technicians and engineers, the USSR produces only 65%
of American output. To outstrip the capitalist countries and to
introduce a "two-hour working day" (both once promised by 1980)
remains a formidable task, even after the great Stalinist millstone
is removed from the neck of the Soviet economy.

At the 23rd Party Congress of the CPSU, held in March 1966, the
Party leaders named and blamed one factory manager after another
for delay in raising productivity - and this is merely the tip of
the iceberg. The extent of wastage exposed in Russia was even more
scandalous. A Soviet Press report talked of 1,600 million roubles'
worth of productive plant lying idle in the RSFSR alone. The figure
for wastage of production in the USSR has been put as high as
30-50%. Every 1% reduction in expenditure is equivalent to an
increase in the national income of 1,500 million roubles. Thus,
even leaving aside the question of raising productivity, the
prevailing chaos pours up to 75,000,000,000 roubles down the drain
(£30 thousand million at the official exchange rate).

Aware of the workers' horror at wastage in their own factories,
and desperately anxious to circumvent their wrath, the Party
leaders shrilly condemn individual scapegoats in the Press, on
posters, at conferences. Thus they pose as great "fighters against
bureaucratism", to whip the lower levels out of an apathy that
could endanger the whole political structure. Kosygin spoke at the
Party Congress of increasing industrial output in the
current five year plan (1966-70) by the comparatively modest figure
of 40%, and simultaneously lowering the consumption of many
materials by as much as 20-25%. It was hoped to save in 1970 over 8
million tons of ferrous rolled stock (equivalent to the annual
output of the giant Magnitogorsk steel plant), 85 million tons of
fuel, 40-50 thousand million kW/h of electricity and "a great
quantity of other material values" by a more efficient use of
resources. This indicates colossal wastage. Kosygin blamed among
other things delayed construction, uninstalled equipment,
unsaleable goods, delay in ordering new equipment, unmechanised
auxiliary operations, underestimation of cost leading to unfinished
construction, and countless other bottlenecks, for this
scandal.

In September 1965 Kosygin complained that only 17% of productive
capacity at the Voskresensk chemical plant was being used and only
32% at the Volkhov aluminium plant. Inexcusable delay in building
new factories meant that the equipment installed became technically
obsolescent even before the plant began to operate. Kosygin singled
out the chemical, iron and steel, building materials, and pulp and
paper industries for special blame in wasting productive
capacity.

At the Congress he revealed delays of eight years in the
implementation of new designs in the production of diesel
locomotives more than twice as productive as the old ones still
produced in bulk.

Unspecified delays of "several years" had occurred in the
adoption of newly-invented metal-working processes superior to
anything in the world; and in the production of new and highly
efficient transistorised electric current converters, in which, he
said, "our industry is lagging inexcusably". A far more efficient
method of producing the useful material polypropylene was invented
by Soviet scientists; but it took five years for the final
decision to be made to adopt it and another year later Kosygin had
to complain that "the Moscow City Economic Council and the State
Chemical Committee have not as yet put it into operation…"
The implementation of new technique was called
"unsatisfactory…inadequate…not in conformity with
modern standards."

Two different designs of tractors are produced, and two of
lorries, each for identical purposes and each of equal capacity -
but the spare parts are not interchangeable. Ten separate designing
organisations of various departments are in charge of the design of
tugboats, so that tugboats of equal capacity are made according to
nine different designs! The official chaos was clearly indicated by
Kosygin in his description of how it took nearly one year just to
agree on the schedule for the manufacture of an oil-drilling
turbodrill suspended on a flexible cable. "Unfortunately," he
continued, "it has not been settled to this day because this matter
required the signatures of fifteen representatives of different
organisations under various state committees and economic councils.
The schedule must be approved by four chairmen of state committees
and two heads of republican economic councils. But even this is not
the limit by far," added Kosygin, "Comrade Zarobyan today described
another instance when thirty signatures from various departments
were needed to agree upon a simple matter."

The wasteful tendency towards introversion and autarchy of all
the "big fishes in small ponds" is not confined to nations or even
to Union republics, but actually to individual factories, which
insist on resisting specialisation and carrying through entire
manufacturing processes under one roof. Thus, for instance, only
56% of lathes are used in the engineering and metal-working
industries themselves and productivity is kept at a tiny fraction
of its possible level. This is an inevitable consequence of the
bureaucratic system whereby each factory is judged in isolation and
each factory manager has to "prove" himself with the record of his
factory as a self-sufficient unit. The woodworking industry often
works at "one-third to one-fifth" of possible productivity, and in
regard to transport Kosygin stated simply that "About half of all
journeys are performed by empty lorries."

An engineer and "Hero of Socialist Labour" complained in
Pravda in April 1966 that, although all the authorities were
unanimous in accepting the need to raise the quality of engineering
products,

"its practical execution meets with resistance all the time on
the part of many executives. The roots of their resistance lie in
the mistaken view that, since expenditure to raise quality doesn't
actually bring direct returns in the form of increased output,
there's no great hurry, it can always be put off for a
bit…"

In construction itself, Kosygin blamed "dispersion of capital
investment" as a "serious shortcoming…many construction
projects about to be commissioned are not provided with financial
and material resources…Building was hampered by the absence
of technical documents or their low quality. The supply of building
sites with equipment was not satisfactory. Designing organisations
at times prepared poor designs and made gross miscalculations in
estimating the cost of projects…In a number of cases, the
designs of enterprises under construction…incorporated
manufacturing process which…specified obsolete
equipment…Productivity of labour is still low, the use of
machinery and mechanisms is unsatisfactory and there are big losses
of labour time." The organisations involved had "not coped with
their duties."

As Kosygin himself puts it: "we have the potential; all we need
is to use it rationally." But he warned the State Planning
Commission in investigating the muddle to ignore "pressure brought
to bear on it by Government departments and local
organisations."

The agricultural crisis was even more severe. During the whole
of the seven-year plan agricultural output increased by only 14% -
a figure well below the target and dwarfed beside an increased
industrial output of 84%. A series of catastrophic harvests
highlighted the terrible backwardness and helplessness of Russia's
economic "Achilles' Heel". Kosygin's proposals to drag the Russian
countryside into the 20th century reveal a general level of culture
hardly less primitive than in the early days of collectivisation -
an appalling scarcity in many areas of electricity, gas, brick
houses, schools, and any kind of cultural amenities. These are not
the conditions for the creation of an agricultural proletariat, and
it is hardly surprising that the collective fields lie visibly
barren while the private strips flourish and blossom.

It has been calculated that half the meat, milk, butter
and eggs consumed in the USSR are privately produced. In the
fertile "black-earth" belt of the Ukraine and the Caucasian
republics, peasant millionaires are not unknown; Georgian peasants
fly in daily to Moscow by aeroplane to sell flowers on
street-corners! But in the vast unfertile territories of parts of
Russia, Siberia, the Central Asian deserts, etc., poverty and
squalor remain. The cash income on some collective farms can be as
low as 20 roubles per month (£5-8), plus private plots.
Despite large-scale investment and tractor production, agricultural
productivity of labour is officially "about one quarter" - actually
it is much less - of that of the USA. With nearly one-third of the
population still working on the land - six times the American rural
labour force - the USSR has twenty times as many farm-workers per
tractor as the USA, and wheat has still to be purchased from the
West.

A mass exodus from the farms into the towns aggravates the
problem still further, and meanwhile huge reserves of rural labour
for harvesting are kept kicking their heels all year in
Byelorussia, Moldavia, the Ukraine, the Caucasus and the
Transcaucasian republics. A modern society can never be built on
the back of a primitive countryside. Prices remain high, raw
materials are in short supply, manpower is squandered, and precious
foreign exchange is consumed, while town and country stand apart in
mutual antithesis.

The contradiction between town and country in the USSR is still
particularly glaring. The capital city is choked to the seams: it
is impossible to qualify for a new flat unless present quarters
provide a maximum of three square meters per person; a special
permit is needed to move in from the provinces; and whole strata
live five to a room - seven families or twenty-five people housed
in one five room flat is not exceptional. It will take until 1980
to reach 82% of the legal minimum living space - itself a modest
standard, doubled in capitalist Belgium. Meanwhile, most of the
country's vast continental land-mass is sparsely populated or
completely deserted. Moscow's population density is about 250 times
greater than that of the enormous territory of Eastern Siberia. The
under-populated areas contain potentially some of the most fertile
soil and richest mineral deposits in the world. The artesian basins
alone in Western Siberia, Kazakhstan and Transcaucasia could supply
free hot water to one hundred million people.

It is not barrenness that keeps these areas deserted: it is pure
incompetence. Khrushchev's notorious "virgin lands" scheme failed
to attract people because no amenities, and often no shelter, were
provided. So urgent was the housing shortage for the pioneers in
the Yakutia diamond region that Russia, one of the world's major
producers of timber, actually imported prefabricated wooden huts
from Finland! When the great Moscow building programme became
hindered by the restrictions which reduced the reserves of building
labour, and special legislation was passed opening Moscow up again
for people who could find homes or jobs there, even agronomists and
veterinary surgeons seized the chance to find a way into the
glittering capital, rather than move to deserts from which they
might never be able to return. Siberia, thirsting for manpower, has
suffered a net loss of 250,000 people in five years, and the
agricultural areas have only a third of the necessary labour. The
pioneering thousands sent out to the East by some state
organisation find little to keep them there, and there they meet
emissaries of other organisations actually sent out to coax them
back to fill training vacancies in Leningrad or Moscow, with all
expenses paid! Thus, at great cost the bureaucrats fail in their
aims.

The bureaucracy in Stalin's day, because of its monopoly of
culture at that time, was able to play a relatively beneficial role
in developing society, thought it saddled the economy with a heavy
burden of wastage and performed its tasks at an exorbitant cost.
Now that the task is no longer to build up the industrial resources
already created by capitalism in the West, now that quality is as
necessary as bulk, now that the economy is second only to America,
the stranglehold of the bureaucracy has become an absolute fetter
on further progress. The examples quoted reveal only a fraction of
the chaos caused by bureaucratism run wild. On every front the
bureaucracy has no other effect but to block the path forward and
to hold society back from realising the unlimited potential of the
planned economy.

The Reply of the Workers

The Soviet working class has rich revolutionary traditions. It
has proved its capacity for heroic sacrifice. But when the
sacrifice is manifestly unnecessary and unequal, it is forced to
stare straight at the roots of the contradictions - the political
perversion of socialism in Soviet society. Khrushchev's era began
to expose the source of the social tensions. "Decentralisation"
meant that for every extra effort workers made, generous bonuses
were paid…to the managers! Once the firing squad had been
abandoned, privilege was flaunted openly in the factories. Workers
today receive on average 90-100 roubles per month (approximately
£25, or at the inflated official exchange rate, £40 at
the most). Ministers, on the other hand, are paid up to 5000
roubles per month (£125 to £200) plus unchecked expense
accounts, dachas (private villas), private sanatoriums, private
theatres and bars, etc. Although the abolition of profiteering
through landlordism, money lending, etc., means that rents are very
low, living conditions for most workers are backward; teeming
Moscow has scandalous overcrowding, while shoddy blocks of flats
and old wooden houses stand the length and breadth of the USSR.
Food is costly, owing to low agricultural productivity, and for
entire seasons in some of the provinces all that can be bought is
the staple poverty diet of bread and potatoes.

Against this grim background, the workers saw the contrasts
sharpening after the bureaucracy's new lurch away from
"centralisation". They saw the USSR grow into an industrial power,
whose export of machinery grew from 1 million roubles in 1955 to
270 million in 1964; trade with ruling cliques in Asian and African
countries increased accordingly by 20% every year between 1953 and
1964 - twice as fast as the overall figure - and, in the bid to buy
friends, cheap long-term credit facilities (giving the USSR a stake
in social "stability" there) and even diplomatic free gifts were
extended to colonial dictators, often of countries where communists
were still languishing in jail (e.g. Indonesia, Iran, Ethiopia,
Iraq, Ghana, and the UAR - in the latter alone 127 projects have
been constructed with Soviet help).

They saw Western tourists flooding in by the thousands, and
special "Valuta" shops established, ostentatiously flaunting
priceless luxury goods for sale at ridiculously cheap prices - for
foreign currency; and they saw the sprouting of lucrative
black-marketeering gangs at all the main tourist centres. They saw
billions of roubles poured into great prestige projects - sputniks,
cosmonauts, rockets to the moon, etc. The bureaucratic mentality of
"socialism in one country" degenerated still deeper with
Khrushchev's "peaceful coexistence" and his "goulash not
revolution" outburst, casually brushing aside any prospect of
socialism in the West. But the workers sensed the thrill of the
extension of the revolution notwithstanding into the American
hemisphere with the victory of Castro's guerrillas against American
Imperialism.

Khrushchev, so affectionately patronised by Western politicians,
became a hated symbol of nepotism and corruption, an upstart
rumoured to own six private dachas and one million-rouble swimming
pool. The state apparatus grew to monstrous proportions, consuming
a gross proportion of the growing volume of production, and every
worker noted with disgust and indignation the bungling and
mismanagement blatantly conducted under his very eyes in his own
factory. Pride at the USSR's staggering achievements was mixed with
growing resentment against the careerism and red tape, squalor and
drunkenness that marred them. The bureaucracy's whole claim to
power, allegedly expertise and administrative efficiency - was
jeopardised in the eyes of the workers, and Khrushchev was
hurriedly replaced against a rumbling background of growing
discontent.

Krasnodar, a mining town in Southern Russia, revolted in protest
at continued food shortages and local corruption. Within a few
hours the whole town was on strike, a workers' Soviet had been
created, the police were disarmed, and the workers massed in the
central square. The significant point was that, although all
conscripts are deliberately stationed as far away as possible from
their homes (so that industrial Leningrad in the North West is
patrolled by Asiatic soldiers and vice-versa), the soldiers based
at Krasnodar refused to open fire on a workers' demonstration. It
was days before a small backward detachment of special "National
Guard" troops could restore "order", and the mutinous soldiers were
arrested.

Class-conscious workers in the Leningrad Communist Party
branches mounted a campaign for independent trade unions, to be
encouraged by Communists to fight against the bureaucrats. The
Party's anti-bureaucratic posture was exposed. Lenin's slogan for
an armed working class was taken up and pressed - and the Leningrad
shipyard workers created an underground organisation of their
own.

An entire ball-bearings plant in Moscow employing tens of
thousands of workers struck for one day in 1957. A Minister had to
attend a strike meeting and explain that, after all, their wages
had risen considerably since the revolution - from 25 to 70 roubles
a month. His voice was interrupted by jeers of "And how much do you
get?" Some of the "ringleaders" were imprisoned for five years.

Workers threatening to strike in one shop in the huge Zil car
plant near Moscow in 1964 defended their action by saying: "If the
French workers can go on strike, then so can we." (There was a
transport strike in Paris at the time.) The director protested:
"But you can't strike against a workers' government!" Their reply
was: "This is a government of bureaucrats." The strike was narrowly
averted by the gratis gift of a fifty-rouble bonus to every worker
in the shop.

Where free political association and expression are denied,
glimmerings of dissent can always be found refracted through the
prism of the arts. Drama in the first years of the revolution was a
primary medium of expression for the masses - revolutionary
pageants re-enacting the storming of the Winter Palace, key battles
from the civil war, etc., involved as many as ten thousand "actors"
in the actual scenes of the events. When the degeneration set in,
the theatre became a stronghold of resistance. A biting satire
produced by Meyerhold in 1925 roused the audience to stand up at
the end of the premiere shouting "Down with Stalin! Down with the
bureaucracy!" In the bitter year 1927 Stalin introduced
restrictions on dramatic freedom as his first task after the
expulsion of the Left Opposition. The turgid repertory of
industrial achievement, historical distortion and Tsarist
chauvinism engulfed it.

But still, by ingenious subterfuges. resistance to the
distortions of Stalinism was occasionally smuggled in past the eyes
of the censors. A play by Mayakovsky, produced only weeks before
his suicide in 1930, ended with the lone figure of a contemptible
busybodying bureaucrat trotting up and down the stage, after all
the other characters have been whisked into the communist future by
a time machine, plaintively whining: "Surely you're not saying that
me and my kind are not necessary for communism?" and answered only
with a roar of jeers from the audience. A children's fairy tale was
staged in 1942, about the slaying of a dragon that had terrorised a
village for centuries by a hero named Lancelot. Lancelot
disappeared after the good deed, and the corrupt mayor stole all
the glory, built up a web of myths concerning his own supreme role
in this heroic event, and arrested all who continued to praise the
ideals of Lancelot. During the terror, secret revolutionaries would
paint the letter "L" on the walls at night. The play ends with the
dramatic return of Lancelot and the flight of the Mayor and all his
lackeys.

Khrushchev walked the precarious tightrope between artistic
licence and philistine repression, knowing that, while strict
censorship would drive the intelligentsia into opposition, freedom
of expression would only strengthen a voice independent of the
state officials and reinforce the social undercurrents of
criticism. The desperate zig-zags both whetted the writers'
appetite for uncensored expression and infuriated them with the
arbitrary pettiness of the censor. Thus there began the
crystallisation of a parallel with the Hungarian "Petofi circle" of
1956 that sparked off the suppressed wrath of the working
class.

The floodgates were wide open. The constant zig-zags in the
party line, politically and economically, nationally and
internationally, the periodic abuse of the long-revered leaders,
the repeated re-writing of Soviet history, the shock of Hungary,
the fragmentation of what was once the "Soviet bloc" into its
national components, all hammered home both the eclecticism and
chauvinism of the party leadership. Genuine worker communists were
forced to go back to the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin to find
the answers to the problems confronting them. Clandestine
discussion groups sprang up spontaneously in factories and
universities alike throughout the length and breadth of the Soviet
Union - tiny embryos of the Soviets of the future.

Lieberman or Lenin

On every front the new leadership has searched around for an
alternative to genuine Soviet power, one last card on which the
survival of the bureaucratic machine itself is staked. Faced with
uproar at the continuing deprivations at home despite enormous
economic advances, panic measures have been taken. Wild promises
have been made of "a Western standard of living by 1970." But the
proposals for achieving this ring very hollow. Prudently
restricting the target for the growth of heavy industry to 49-50%
in the current five year plan, the government hopes to raise the
growth of the consumer industries to 43-46%, as against a rise of
36% in the previous five years. The consumption fund must also
increase by 11,000 million roubles annually, in comparison with an
annual increase of 6,500 million roubles over the last five years.
Assets of the food industry, trade, housing and the social services
must double and the engineering and chemical industries must
produce a greater proportion of consumer goods. At the same time,
great emphasis is given to the quality of consumer goods. In the
past shoddy and often quite unsaleable goods were produced in bulk,
simply to fulfil the quota quickly. "Not infrequently," said
Kosygin, "our enterprises are producing low quality goods which the
consumer does not want and which therefore remain unsold." Without
democratic control by workers, who will insist on high standards,
there is no way of preventing this. If output looks adequate on
paper, then the managers' comfortable superiors will be
satisfied.

The constant zig-zags from centralisation to de-centralisation
and back again are the clearest proof of the insoluble crisis of
bureaucratic control. As a last resort, the party leaders have
devised an unwieldy hybrid structure which will undoubtedly give
the Soviet economy the worst of both worlds. The adoption of
Professor Lieberman's "profit incentive" scheme implies, not a
reversion to capitalism, but an episodic gimmick in the
leadership's long efforts somehow to trick the managers into
seeming to have identical interests to those of the workers, into
enthusiastically overcoming all the contradictions inevitably
associated with their own existence: Kosygin tries to reconcile the
irreconcilable on a bureaucratic basis: to combine "controlled
state planning with the complete cost accounting of enterprises,
the centralised management of industries with a broad local
economic initiative, the principle of one-man management with a
greater role for the personnel."!

While engineering has again come under the control of no less
than nine central ministries, other industries were left to eleven
ministries in each of the Union Republics, and others were still to
be run on an even more parochial local scale. Meanwhile, the
factory manager at each unit of production would be paid according
to the profitability of his enterprise. He would borrow money from
the state (with interest charged), buy his raw materials, and fix
the prices of the finished goods, and the decision would be left to
him on the proportion of profits to be reinvested, the proportion
to go into the workers' wage packets, the proportion to be put into
housing and other welfare services provided by the place of
employment and the proportion to find its way into his own
pocket.

In the capitalist Victorian heyday of "laissez-faire" and
private enterprise, before the age of monopolisation, rampant
bureaucratic wastage was checked with the whip of the market. The
Soviet bureaucrats today, on the basis of a planned economy, and
fifty years after the October revolution, can think of nothing
better than to ape the free play of market forces, in a grotesque
child's pantomime. The immediate effect of the reorganisation was
to provoke the revival of totally unnecessary unemployment for the
first time since the days of the NEP. Kosygin's aim was to
"strengthen and perfect centralised planning and at the same time
to develop democratic bases of economic management, to assist in
every way the unfolding of the creative activity of the masses."
But not by any means the masses of the workers. Kosygin had in mind
the "masses" of petty managers and officials up and down the vast
territory of the USSR. He was unable to deny that "perfection of
economic management is impossible without a further development of
its democratic principles, without a considerable extension of the
participation of the masses in industrial management…A
feeling must be instilled in all workers that they are masters of
their factory."

It is precisely because the whole situation cries aloud for
democratic management and control over production by the workers
through Soviets with the right of appointment and recall over all
administrators, that Kosygin feels impelled to add in desperation
that "the role of one-man management in industry is becoming of
special importance now." But a river of blood divides Lenin's
system of management responsible to Soviets from the Stalinist
system of managerial tyranny.

As with every other twist and turn in the past, for a year or
two the new system will undoubtedly correct certain anomalies and
produce impressive statistics. But again as at every time in the
past, initial progress will come to an end as new anomalies are
created. As the managers get to know all the loopholes, a new spate
of swindling and corruption will result, mixed this time with the
bungling associated with the clumsy multiplicity of supervisory
bodies that have been resurrected from the era of centralised
ministerial control. Other features will be the added fingers of
the local and Union Republic authorities in the pie, plus wasteful
duplication arising from control at individual enterprise level,
plus the extra wastage of cut-throat competition, profiteering and
squandering on manpower, as the economy is distorted into a faint
caricature of a market economy. (Managers have been told to "create
a demand for consumer goods"!)

Long before there is the slightest danger of private
accumulation leading to capitalist restoration, the government will
do yet another sharp volte-face and nip the profiteering in the bud
with another round of shootings, probably seasoned again with a
delicately disguised dash of anti-semitism. For reasons of economy,
all workers are to transfer on to a five-day week - but it is
noticeable that no opportunity is being taken in the process to
advance towards the "two-hour working day", and workers still work
a forty-one hour basic week. The bureaucracy is prepared to do
anything at all for the Soviet economy - except get off its back.
But this is the last real service it could perform.

To raise the general economic level, a crash programme of
massive investment into agriculture is planned. More is to be spent
on agriculture within the current five-year plan than in the
previous twenty years, more than on the vast defence machine.
Tractor production is to rise by 60%, and other mechanical aids are
to be rapidly developed. The low productivity of labour in
agriculture must rise by 40-45% - faster than in industry - and
capital resources on the farms are to be almost doubled and
renovated.

Further efforts are to be made to cultivate the non-black-earth
belt and irrigate the Kazakhstan deserts. The collective farmer's
income (in cash and in kind) is to rise by 35-40%, compared with a
mere 20% rise in the wages of "workers and clerical employees".
(The two categories are always lumped together in Soviet statistics
and no figures are officially available on the distribution of
personal incomes.) For the moment, reactionary proposals to divide
farms into tiny "co-operatives" of half a dozen peasant households
have been rejected. In the effort to hold the manpower on the
farms, the provision of a guaranteed minimum income for collective
farmers (closer to the wages of the farm workers on the minority of
state farms) is gradually to be introduced; and theatres, cinemas,
concert halls, schools, etc., are being built - a policy amusingly
entitled "abolition of the differences between town and country".
Large-scale electrification and gasification are planned. Rural
consumption of electricity is to be trebled by 1970.

Thus, where Stalin had rejected the long-term solution, of
gradually raising the cultural level of the peasantry and
"collectivising by example", and hurriedly adopted instead the
panic-stricken emergency adventure into "complete
collectivisation", his successors today, faced with an immediate
crisis, have belatedly introduced measures which would take at
least a generation to produce results. In the short term, a
guaranteed income can only discourage the peasants from making
anything like full use of the vastly expanded productive forces.
Kosygin has tacitly admitted this by making advance grain purchases
from the West for a further three years, bad harvest or not.

Far from overcoming the social contradictions, the new system
will greatly widen the gulf between workers and managers. To
relieve the housing difficulties, and further appease the managers,
it has been decreed that, side by side with state construction, it
is permissible for officials, professors, star performers, and
others who can afford it to invest in "housing co-operatives" and
build private blocks of flats, at up to 200 roubles
(£50-£80) per square metre. Promises have been made to
double, treble and quadruple the number of Soviet cars,
televisions, refrigerators etc., not for the workers, but to
provide the material incentives to the managers who will raise
profits only if there are luxury goods to be bought and they need
not risk their necks by accumulating money. To give the consumer
industries an artificial push forward, huge orders have been placed
with Western car, electronics and chemical monopolies for the
construction of productive plant. Used to strengthen the revolution
by raising productivity, this economic policy would be absolutely
correct. But here the bureaucracy, terrified of social revolution
in the West, is making a political offer of the expanding Soviet
market as a final prop to the countries most exposed to the
fluctuations of the capitalist world market. This marriage of
convenience cannot solve the problems for either side. Only the
programme of world socialism can point a clear way forward.

Two programmes are offered to the Soviet Union. One, that of the
"profit motive", compromising deals with Western countries,
great-power politics and betrayal - a further degradation which has
gained the unconcealed approval of Tory politician Sir Fitzroy
Maclean, who gloated that "in the land of revolution, revisionism
is now rampant." (Noting the existence today of 500 Soviet rouble
millionaires, Sir Fitzroy remarked "this is not enough, but it is a
step in the right direction!") The other programme is the programme
of Marx and Lenin to fight against bureaucratism, a programme
gaining close attention throughout the USSR; the programme of the
Paris Commune, the October revolution, Hungary, State and
Revolution and the Left Opposition. Only the latter can solve a
single problem facing the workers of the Soviet Union and of the
world.

Towards a New October

Bourgeois professors, to whom the very idea of socialism in the
West is unthinkable, conclude empirically that "Stalinism was
necessary to industrialise the country", that all the blood and
bungling was only an inevitable by-product of Russia's advance. But
it was inevitable only while the revolution remained isolated. The
bureaucracy never had any shadow of the historical purpose and
mission of a ruling class. From the very beginning, the Stalinist
bureaucracy was parasitic and wasteful, only a cancerous appendage
of the workers' state. Its contribution while the workers were weak
and illiterate has long since passed.

The Soviet bureaucracy today has become an absolute
strait-jacket on further progress. It is not only the vast
privileges it consumes which hold society back, but above all its
usurpation of control to safeguard those privileges. Only
democratic Soviet power can efficiently harness the resources of
the economy. The price of Stalinism today amounts to 30-50% of
production.

By clinging on to the national states which are the source of
their positions, all the Stalinist bureaucracies stand in the way
of socialism. The lowest point of nationalist degeneration has been
reached today, with actual border skirmishes sacrificing the blood
of Soviet and Chinese soldiers to preserve frontiers established by
Tsars and Mandarins.

The income differential between managers and workers, officers
and soldiers, state bureaucrats and the people in the USSR is
higher than that of the capitalist countries. The news that the
disgraced ex-leader Khrushchev retains private servants makes one
wonder what luxuries are spared for the current Ministers, Party
bosses, Generals, etc.

The working class is no longer weak, weary and illiterate. It is
today a hundred million strong, and is undoubtedly the best
educated working class in the world. One third of the population
over seven years old is studying, and well over half the working
population has had a full secondary education. In 1966, 68 million
engaged in study, including 13 million at adult classes, of whom
two million were workers taking university courses outside working
hours. Such is the thirst for knowledge that 80% of pupils at
secondary schools apply to enter university, and the bureaucracy
has to limit this tremendous demand from lack of vacancies. The
first pretext of the bureaucrats, superior culture, has vanished.
No longer can they pose as the saviours of the revolution.

The rapid development of technique has turned the tasks of
administration into a simple mechanical operation. Planning,
accounting and control no longer pose the problems they once did. A
brand new chain of 800 computer centres has just been built, to
operate all over the USSR in the mechanisation of accounting. The
sole problem now is to check the accuracy of the figures sent in by
greedy managers.

The economy screams out aloud for popular control. Only workers
on the job are in a position to eradicate wastage and
irrationality. The Party leaders themselves know that only the
vigilance of the workers can prevent swindling, pilfering and
bungling - but one thing they will never do is encourage the
workers to supervise production. No privileged group in history has
ever surrendered its position without a fight. In the ludicrous
attempt to get all the benefits but none of the dangers of a check
on the lesser administrators, they have presided over the most
grotesque and absurd swelling of the official apparatus. Planning
clerks plan the work of the planning organisations; one flippant
Soviet professor has calculated that planning grows as the square
of production, and by 1980 the entire population will have to be
planners! Accountants are enrolled to check the accounts drawn up
by other accountants within the factories; and now as many as one
million accountants work in the USSR, in dozens of
quasi-independent auditing bodies. To protect the publicly-owned
economy from personal plunder, over two million guards and watchmen
are employed in the USSR - thirty times the corresponding figure
for Britain, with a quarter of the USSR's population. If we add to
this the millions of managers and directors of state organisations
and committees, factories, mines, farms and other institutions,
plus the large standing army, plus the pervasive network of police,
patrols, secret police and paid informers, plus the enormous volume
of needless clerical work performed for all these bodies, operating
on national, Union-republic and regional levels, we can get a faint
conception of the monstrous squandering of manpower which consumes
incalculable portions of production and whose only effect is to
clog up the economy until it reaches near-standstill.

The traditions of October, the traditions of Budapest and
Krasnodar are the only force that can burst through the Stalinist
bottleneck. And although the self-sacrificing and loyal Soviet
working class is extending just one final period of patient trust,
the inevitable shortcomings in the plan will meet with angry
criticism. The bitter experiences of treachery, deceit and
distortion have destroyed the authority of the bureaucracy under
whatever label it parades itself.

"The wind blows the tops of the trees first," as Trotsky said,
and the ferment today among the intelligentsia is an ominous
indication of the winds blowing through society. The panic and
indecision of the government, publishing Solzhenitsyn's masterly
exposure of the horrors of Stalin's labour camps, on the one hand,
and imprisoning the writers Sinyavsky and Daniel, on the other,
have infuriated the writers. At the Writers' Congress this year
Solzhenitsyn himself took the unprecedented step of circulating a
private letter to 300 delegates, asking the Congress to "discuss
the intolerable oppression to which literature has been subjected
for decades by censorship…a medieval anachronism."

Dozens of leading writers and poets signed a circular supporting
his stand. The literary struggle (at this stage the clearest
symptom of social unrest) has actually brought the ideas of Trotsky
and the Left Opposition into print again (though in a grossly
distorted form) in a novel by an apologist of Stalinism who seeks
to blacken ideas that are once again coming to the fore, despite
decades of falsification. The ideas of internationalism and Soviet
democracy cannot be obliterated; they are borne out today with
redoubled force. It was a demonstration of the Hungarian Petofi
circle that began the revolution of 1956. The radicalisation of the
Soviet intellectuals will reinforce the undercurrents of criticism
and rouse the population out of its decades of inertia.

Hungary, Krasnodar and countless other incidents prove that,
once the working class demands its political right to control, only
the top handful of bureaucrats will offer any resistance. The
bureaucracy is not a social class; it has no independent
relationship to production; it is not based upon personal property;
it performs no historically progressive function; and it is
impossible to determine where it begins and where it ends. It has
all the vices of a ruling class, without having any historic
mission. The underpaid clerical workers and the soldiers have the
same interests as the industrial workers; and the lower echelons of
the bureaucracy will give support to the workers, once a lead is
given.

In the worldwide advance towards socialism, the basic economic
gains of October 1917 ensure that what will take Western workers
years of bitter struggle, in uprooting the old society, can be
achieved overnight in the Stalinist countries. All that are needed
are political changes, on the lines of Lenin's four points
safeguarding workers' management against bureaucratism. Unlike the
capitalists of the West, the bureaucracy has no separate ideology
and culture based on private property, religion, "law and order",
etc. For their privileges the bureaucrats pay a heavy tribute to
the working class: the constant pretence that they are Communists,
the sanctification of every manoeuvre with a quotation from Lenin,
the mass publication of the works of Marxism. Every move has to be
justified with reference to the attainment of communism, a
stateless and classless society. Under what banner can they resist
the demand for Soviet power?

Fifty years is a drop in the ocean of history. In the transition
from feudal to capitalist society many political upheavals brought
one section after another of the capitalist class to power. It was
nearly a hundred years after the great French Revolution that the
capitalists finally achieved direct control over the state. The
need for a new, political revolution in Russia is the price of the
isolation of the social revolution in 1917 and its subsequent
degeneration. The Stalinist bureaucracy will crumble away as soon
as its position faces a serious challenge.

Crisis faces the diseased capitalist class in the West as it
does the diseased bureaucracy in the East. Nobody can say which
will be overthrown first. But, just as the Stalinist cancer fed on
the stability of capitalism beyond the Soviet borders, the most
valuable support we can give to the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese,
Indonesian or American workers is to work for the downfall of
capitalism at home in Britain.

The resurgence of the ideas of October in Russia will be based
now not on a backward semi-colonial society, but on the second
mightiest economy in the world, on a working class that is strong,
solid and educated, on modern technological resources. The lessons
of October, the programme of Socialism, workers' democracy,
Soviets, internationalism, the principles of the Paris Commune, the
Russian revolution, and Hungary, will inspire the workers of East
and West. The worldwide overthrow of capitalism, begun fifty years
ago, will be completed, and Mankind will pass on to socialism and
dazzling new peaks of civilisation. If it fails, and the mighty
labour movement suffers cataclysmic defeats, the only prospect is a
return to the horrors of the 1930s, this time on the level of a
nuclear holocaust. The message of October is the only answer to the
crisis of Mankind.